A solid point & click adventure game with an excellent, unique style and music. A fun world to see and inhabit.

The game's clear, biggest shortcoming is that the majority of its puzzles are not logical. AT ALL. This makes sense in terms of the story (your character is obviously a tad unhinged), but poses a practical problem for the player who outright has no grasp of what is expected of them, or why. In a way, that gives it an oldschool vibe: many of the old classics were comparably difficult. But, today, this can feel extremely frustrating.

Memoranda is a throwback to the style of adventure games at the end of 1990s, where the genre was pretty much buried with the rise of online gaming and co-op, et cetera. The game features a 2D world, beautifully drawn and coloured, as well as rather idiosyncratic characters in a magical-realist world.

The player controls Mizuki, a severe insomniac who has "lost" her name. Set in a small, unspecified seaside town, the game takes Mizuki to various locations where she grapples with various problems and helps out numerous odd-ball characters, such as a man who only cooks spaghetti, or a girl who only speaks to people who have children.

Memoranda is a smooth game, in the sense that its parts mesh well in terms of mood and gameplay. As is the case with most games of its genre, its layout is simple: go to X, solve the puzzle Y, et cetera. The actual takeaway from this relatively simple playstyle are the themes and mood the game offers. Its characters are amusing, its locations are alluring, its dialogues are interesting and its artwork is very charming.

It's not without shortcomings, however. One drawback is perhaps that the puzzles sometimes require a bit too much of a leap of logic (which is not helped by the underlying narrative structure of magical realism) or provide too much of a red herring in their resolution that may prevent the actual connections to solve them. As far as general gameplay is concerned, it could definitely use either a highlighting mechanic or a hint system that unfolds from subtle clues to, eventually, a straightforward comment on what to do (the final iteration of the game does now feature a hint system). The propensity for pixel-hunting, although a frequent feature (or more likely, eternal agony) of older titles, is like a way-too-real Renaissance Fair, where you'd also contact Black Death for that extra "immersion".

Overall, however, Memoranda is a decent piece of work that caters to both longtime fans of the genre, as well as those who might want to try their hands at point-and-click adventure games.

Yeah, sometimes those walk-through needing points? Also game critical moments where everything stops until you figure it out. Several times I got "stuck" without any idea of what to do next. I ended up consulting a walk through 3 times during the game just to stop clicking around aimlessly.

All-in-all, I would recommend this game. I'm a huge Murakami fan, and the game's successful adaptation of the nature of his work was worth the occassional struggle. Luckily, by now, there's a solid walk through that can help you when you run against the evil force keeping you back.

Its unique art style and interesting premise aside, Memoranda doesn’t have a lot going for it. The nonsensical story, 1-dimensional characters, and lack of direction or a clear idea of what to do next makes for a frustrating—not to mention brief—experience.

The game started out promisingly enough with insomniac Mizuki pacing her room, the source of her affliction, a red-eyed dwarf, vowing that as long as he couldn’t sleep, neither could she. The smooth animation, fully voice acted script, and bizarre, but beautiful artstyle created a distinct atmosphere and I was eager to find out how I’d be able to dispel Mizuki’s demon.

In typical point and click fashion, your protagonist is given a laundry list of tasks to complete in order to move the plot forward. Memoranda’s journal/quest log of choice called a memoranda and Mizuki updates it when you get something new to do. Unfortunately, she scribbles down personal notes the way one might in their own private journal, meaning that it may or may not make sense to someone other than the person who wrote it while these scribble notes fit in with the game thematically, a lot of them only gave the vaguest sense of what actually needed to be done.

This meant that I spent more time travelling from screen to screen, trying my most recently acquired item on people and trying to combine random items in my inventory.

Even the townspeople, who could have very well have made a helpful suggestion such as “Hey, have you spoken to so-and-so?” just continued to spit out one of their three pre-programmed lines, so they were of no help. I finally broke down and used the only guide posted in the community hub, which is why my playtime is only 4 hours.

One of those four were spent trying not to tear my hair out and the other three were actually spent playing the game with the occasional, infrequent glance at my handy, dandy guide.

In conjunction with the oftentimes obscure memoranda is the story itself. It’s based off of a collection of short stories, so perhaps it’s my own fault for not having read that first, but the game just seemed to be a Frankenstein of parallel story paths that were strangely disjointed, but somehow relevant to the fact that Mizuki had trouble remembering her name.

The dwarf I mentioned earlier, for example, I had assumed had something to do with the missing name, but it turned out that he was just another random weird part of Mizuki’s life. Add to that a near-suicidal man who wants to be a fish, an investigator who is looking for a weirdly human-sized elephant and the runaway man who’s harboring him, a duck doctor who brews mysterious potions, a “dragon”, an opera singing man-cat, a deadbeat who vomits the peanut punch he was so desperate for a war between an army of frogs and a giant worm, a girl who killed herself and feared a monkey would steal her name - the list goes on and the majority of these tangents go on without a resolution.

Instead, you end up with a lot of unanswered questions and the sour taste of “that’s it”? When the credits roll, not too long after the game starts.

If this was an episodic game, fine. The confusion would likely be answered by subsequent chapters. As a completed work, however, Memoranda is like a machine with too many complicated working parts--Some of the parts just don’t function the way they should and instead serve as clutter.

In trying to make this plot complex and many layered, the creator only manages to needlessly convolute the main plot—that is, the problem with Mizuki’s memory—with a bunch of fetch quests and 1-dimensional characters that serve no other purpose than to move the main plotline along.

And that fact shows. The other characters are people who Mizuki’s seems to be very familiar with and as such, it seems that she doesn’t need to explain anything about them other than their name and occupation. The art in Mizuki’s mind, however, nor have we shared any of her 30 years on Earth and so these strangers she chats with so warmly are held at arm’s length and are made stranger still by the fact that we have no idea why we should care about them or their problems.

This utter lack of character development makes the game feel even more like a chore because at no point do you feel empathetic towards any of the characters that appear once, say their peace, and a re never heard from again. There is nothing memorable about them other than the fact that they are strange people or creatures in a strange world--their motivations, likes and dislikes, and what makes them more than a plot device is lost.

Phil is the perfect example of an interesting characters rendered one dimensional by loose ends. He's mentioned early on and, indeed, his story seems to run parallel of Mizuki's because she spends much of the game trying to figure out where he was located and, upon finding him, protecting him from being located by someone investigating the disappearance. After completing a few tasks geared towards helping him become a human, you find out that this weirdly proportioned elephant doesn't actually want to be a human and the man who said he did was actually lying to keep you busy.

Which is insult to injury considering these are clearly fetch quests meant to pad your short game time.

After that, that's it. You don't find out why the elephant has gone missing, why the runaway man is harboring him, or where they end up in the end. You just leave the elephant sitting in an armchair and talking gibberish (apparently elephants speak gibberish) and the man cooking spaghetti. For all of eternity.

The game looks great and the music is quite nice. The voice acting, however, leaves something to be desired. Personally, I found the main character's very noticeable lisp maddening. Other voice actors sounded phoned in--as though they were recorded in a large, echo-y room or passed through some other medium like a phone and then recorded by a device.

.Pros.

Music and unique art style

A cast of colourful characters and locations to visit.

.Cons.

The story is too convoluted for its own good. Multiple story paths lead nowhere, creating a mess of loose ends.

The voice acting isn't great. It’s very phoned in, sometimes sounding like the speaker was recorded through some medium then through mic

Those interesting characters never get fully fleshed out.

Some of the solutions aren’t practical. Why can't I realistically use the world around me rather than having to solve it the ONE way the game wants me to?

Very few interactive points in many of game screens. They were pretty, but empty.

You spend a lot of time wandering, not knowing you have to backtrack. New ways open and people show up and you don’t even know they’re there. (Can’t talk to people without marker over their heads, which means they serve as props).

No way to speed up actions. Interactions have to play out in their entirety. This is a very basic function in most point and clicks.

.Bottom Line.

I found Memoranda to be subpar in terms of story and gameplay elements. Strange is fine, but the disjointed, random events that make up this surreal tale border on the nonsensical and, by the end, you have more questions than answers.

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Memoranda has an incredibly beautiful art style, coupled with great voice acting and original music. I really enjoyed how the protagonist has a slight lisp - making her imperfect and yet "simple" is a great counterpoint with the surrealism of the game - opera singer cats, elephants on the run. Also, even the human characters in the game are brimming with personality through their actions, personality, hobbies or appearance. It's a really colourful and varied game with the goal of finding the protagonist's escaped name, and to help her get some sleep after weeks of insomnia :)Gameplay-wise it's a user-friendly point and click, that is a bit harder than recent games, for example the Wadjeteye games. It requires some attention to detail in environment / sounds (sometimes taking notes is useful) similarly to the old Lucasarts games, while lacking the typcal moon logic. On the contraty - surrealism makes it weirder, and sometimes harder than a "normal" game would be, so it's middle ground in unusual solutions. A fellow player made walkthrough for the game that is available on Steam, the game is accessible for people who just want a story and the amazing looksIt was a really awesome experience, I really fell in love with its visual and audio design :)

Beautiful graphics, a traditional point n' click structure and some clever shortcuts (there are no loading screens to be seen, too) make this a relatively fast-paced Adventure game! No great music or dialogue, some riddles are not logical at all and the story has a lot of inconsistencies but these faults don't stop it from being really interesting.

Its parts may not be great, but the game itself will keep you returning for at least 8 hours!

I feel really bad to give a negative review because I love the art, the music, and the great voice acting. I really appriciate the effort given to the game aesthetic.

The game play, however, is frustrating. I have no problem with surreal story but the puzzles could have been more logical. The lack of instruction made it impossible for me to be patient enough to complete the game without walkthrough.

The begining of the game was very promising, but later on it has gotten too random for me to enjoy the story. It's ashame because if it has been more polished, it would have been a great game

I'm glad I got this game on sale or else I would not feel like this game worth buying at all.

I happened to find this game before it was officially released and upon seeing a few screenshots without even checking out the story, I thought to myself, "Wow, I'll definitely play this when it comes out!". The beautiful artstyle of Memoranda left a very nice first impression on me and it's one of the most outstanding features of it in my opinion.

As a point & click adventure game, Memoranda is well-polished and competent enough to offer you a sweet, memorable experience.

The game is inspired by Murakami Haruki's short stories, having a strong magic realism vibe artistically. In the world of Memoranda, magical events and outlandish stuff can be seen every now and then. Humans, animals, and humanimals live together harmoniously and doing their everday mundane chores. Mizuki, a young girl who has difficulty rememering her real name, sets foot on an adventure in pursuit of her true identity and other long-lost memories. En route to her final destination, she's going to meet all kinds of characters each of whom has his or her own personality and worries.

Aesthetically, the colorful palettes and exquisite textures make every scene in the game so lively and picturesque. Emotionally, the soothing background music and light-hearted dialogues with affectionate voice acting build up an immersive atmosphere for the players. Playing the game is like sunbathing on a beach, it's delightful and relaxing, you control your own pace and nothing urgent or threatening is gonna happen to you.

However, speak of pacing, that leads us to the most commonly complained problem of the game: the difficulty. Compared with other games in the genre, Memoranda can be truly frustrating. Although the gameplay is nothing more than the typical "examine, collect, combine, and talk" interactions in point & click games, making progress can be really hard from time to time due to the leaps of logical reasoning and the lack of straightforward hints, which can really hinder the continuous flow of experience and wear down the players quickly. From my perspective, this is genuinely a serious problem of the game as it can potentially waste you plenty of time and have you resort to trial and error or a walkthrough in order to continue. The actual contents in the game may provide you approximately 2~3 hours of playtime but with the additional time you are probably going to spend in blindly wandering around and performing random interations it can be unecessarily lengthy, which is undoubtedly frustrating for what should have been a joyful ride to end up like an endurance test.

Overall, despite the undesirable frustration, Memoranda is a charming, beautifully crafted game and I really enjoyed it. If you're fond of point & click adventure games, give it a try and hopefully, it'll satisfy you and make your day a little more better.

I'm pretty disappointed. I kickstarted this because of the Murakami's references, and they were indeed fun to recognize, but the story isn't attractive and the puzzle are... well, weak at best, most being not really "logical". It's a shame, since the OST is nice and the art is good.